I want to do a little case study, someone who I felt did an excellent job of personal branding, and
that is Mr. Andrew Henderson, who is probably more famous for his brand name, nomadic capitalist.
Now, Andrew is a blogger on YouTube, and he provides some very insightful advice for people that want
to live in different countries and do things like lower their tax bill, and he's catering to people
that are on the higher end, higher income end of the digital nomad.
So these are people that have, for example, an eight figure Amazon business or consulting business,
something like that.
And they decided, OK, I'm paying too many taxes in Australia, USA, wherever I want to go, move
to Malaysia.
Now, one of the reasons he's catering to people that are higher income is because of how he makes his
money, which is this agency that offers, like consulting advice on things like reducing your taxes
and stuff.
So he's not like a lot of influencers whose primary business is basically being a media company.
So selling eyeballs and kind of one off consulting advice, one on one with the person that's making
the videos, he's he's built more of a solid consulting firm.
Now, one of the first things I want to point out is that he didn't have a super strong brand in the
beginning, and this is the correct approach that you should be taking in business, is when you're
in the early stages.
Branding matters less in brand, marketing matters less.
In the beginning, you should be in more of an experimental growth hacking mindset of I'm going to test
different things at the strategic level.
So I'm going to test different target markets.
I'm going to test different kind of value propositions in terms of what I sell.
And then later on, when I'm more solidified in terms of, OK, here are the people that I actually
want to serve and I don't want to serve these other people.
And this is how I fundamentally create value.
I figure that out OK.
I've had a few failures and contracts that went under, etc. When you have a more solidified sense of
who you are and what you want to do, then you focus on branding.
And that's where things like design and presentation start to matter a whole lot more.
Now, there are some exceptions to that in the very early stages.
For some types of personal branding, you need to really step it up a notch.
So fashion, luxury, fashion would be an example of that.
You want to be an influencer in that space.
You probably need to focus on brand from the get go, but not necessarily in the consulting side.
So brands more important when you get to scalability, less important in kind of the early upstart stages.
So if you look at the old videos that he did and he's put out tons and tons of videos, it was more
or less just him with his phone up to his face, you know, was kind of distorted.
He's out walking around.
It's not not super professional, but about what you would expect from any YouTube.
But the substance was that he was providing very good advice.
Right.
He was a very fortunate person who's actually lived in these countries.
But you see that there's the shift that happened in the last couple of years or so where suddenly the
branding kicks into gear.
And let's take a look at what that looks like.
OK, so one of the things that stands out to me here in the beginning is that there's a sound he has
some brand sounds, which we talked about when we looked at the brand plan in the beginning of his videos.
And there's this instrumental music.
I'm not playing it for you here, but you can go on YouTube and watch if you want.
The the other thing is that this gets basically gets applied to all of them after there's a little teaser.
So he does a little teaser and then there's a little intro vid.
The place and it shows the slogan for his company or the model or whatever word you want to use, go
where you're treated best.
So this is the slogan that helps kind of communicate what he is offering in a more emotional way, which
is typically what you're conveying in the brand messaging as opposed to product messaging, service
messaging.
So basically, the idea is like you're you're you're being abused or you're not being treated well.
You know, you're a successful entrepreneur, but the government wants to take 60 percent of your money
in taxes.
When you add up sales tax, income tax, cetera, you're not being treated best.
You deserve better.
So he's getting to the heart of that emotion, which is very different from what you may be doing when
you're selling your services and your products.
Right.
There can be more of a rational thing.
This is more of an emotional thing.
So he OK, so there's so many elements being applied here.
The sounds, the motto, the consistency.
So he has a formula that he does with his videos, right, the teaser, there's the sound, there's
the slogan, there's the logo, the Nomad Capitalis, which is a part of the brand tactics, and then
there's the actual video, which provides very useful educational content and his style to.
Right.
He's usually in something somewhat preppy.
You see here he has a blazer on and, you know, it's a different color blazer each time.
And you don't have to be so rigidly consistent that you're always wearing the exact same suit, although
you could argue that would be helpful.
He's got these nice glasses, his hairstyle.
He probably is a stylist now.
Looks great.
He's got DSL.
Ah, it looks like filming with the blurry background.
Now, his context changes a lot where he does the filming, but there's a an overall template he's using
that creates the consistency and consistency is how people remember your brand.
A couple of other things that he does and musicians do this to some extent, too, is in his videos.
He'll often begin with.
Hi, I'm Andrew Henderson.
I help blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
With what?
So he keeps reminding people and educating them on what he actually sells, says, excuse me, he's
not just in it to be a media companies, not just in it to get eyeballs.
He's in this business to sell something.
So he keeps reminding you about what he sells before he gets into the specifics about the selfless education
that he's providing.
OK, so musicians do that, right?
Sometimes in music video or in the song, they'll actually say the person's name, right.
To build the fame of Ariana Grande or whoever it is some of you have to have a personal branding is
you need to build that brand fame and that that brand recall of your name.
Another thing that he does, and he's done this earlier in the video as well as hold up his book.
So his book is not a big moneymaker.
He's admitted that.
And lots of people have admitted that they put out books even though they don't make much money.
But what they do is they help solidify the brand, the credibility of the brand.
I am the author of this book, and there's something, some sort of special quality to putting out a
book for some reason that you don't you don't have with other kinds of educational content.
So it's putting it up to help reinforce the brand and the credibility of the brand, that there's a
book behind it.
And there's also consistency to often applies this to the ends of video.
So the middle of the video is kind of where the bulk of the content is.
That's kind of unique.
And then there's the end cap and that that little intro cap that are fairly consistent.
And templating.
Now, a few other things I want to call out here.
One of them was I stressed the importance of partnering up with other people, other influencers, other
brand personalities.
He has done an excellent job of that.
So, for example, he has videos where he's with the author of Rich Dad Porta.
So this is a credibility signal.
And you want to look for is the audience overlap?
Who who has influence with the people that you want to influence partner up with those people in those
brands?
He's also shown up on other influencers channels to add his specific expertise to their channel.
So he might be a guest speaker there.
I've seen that a few times and it looks like he's also doing this specific video on Krypto.
And I don't know who this person is, but he likely has a large audience to maybe specifically in the
crypto space and perhaps there's some overlap there.
So he's done an excellent job in the partner marketing to help reinforce the brand and the brand positioning.
Now, one of the most important things that he and his team has done is apply consistent brand design.
So look at the green.
The green is very consistently applied here.
We have these corner corners forming a very easy template that he can use across all the video thumbnails.
So he's really trying to build a brand here.
It's not just I want this individual video to go viral.
It's I want my brand embedded in people's psyche, which is the macro level picture of what you're doing
with brand marketing.
It's not about little hit videos here and there.
It's more about solidifying brand brand positioning, brand memory.
Now, something I mentioned earlier, based on what we're hearing from LinkedIn, is that you don't
want to be bland and boring.
So that's one of the challenges when you're you have this issue right.
You want to be consistent because that's how you build memorability, but you don't want to be boring
and bland.
So in your grand scheme, particularly on the design level, there needs to be some modularity.
Right.
So there's consistency here in terms of it's always green here and there's always some black in the
background.
But you notice the images change, right?
Here's a picture of Joe Biden.
Here's the influencer in a gray sweater.
But here he is in a purple suit or with a different expression.
So you're not consistent to the point of being bland, but you're consistent to the point of having
real estate in people's memory.